Secure Decentralized Pliable Index Coding for Target Data Size

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure, decentralized pliable index coding scheme that efficiently manages heterogeneous client side-information while ensuring each client receives a fixed number of messages without excess, enhancing real-world applicability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel transmission scheme for heterogeneous DPIC that guarantees security and efficiency, addressing limitations of prior homogeneous assumptions.

Findings

The scheme achieves optimized communication cost under security constraints.

Clients receive exactly the target number of messages, no more or less.

The approach improves applicability to real-world distributed systems.

Abstract

Decentralized Pliable Index Coding (DPIC) problem addresses efficient information exchange in distributed systems where clients communicate among themselves without a central server. An important consideration in DPIC is the heterogeneity of side-information and demand sizes. Although many prior works assume homogeneous settings with identical side-information cardinality and single message demands, these assumptions limit real-world applicability where clients typically possess unequal amounts of prior information. In this paper, we study DPIC problem under heterogeneous side-information cardinalities. We propose a transmission scheme that coordinates client broadcasts to maximize coding efficiency while ensuring that each client achieves a common target level $T$. In addition, we impose a strict security constraint that no client acquires more than the target $T$ number of messages, guaranteeing that each client ends up with exactly $T$ messages. We analyze the communication cost incurred by the proposed scheme under this security constraint.